I’ve finally put together a group interested in playing BitD.

I’ve finally put together a group interested in playing BitD.

I’ve finally put together a group interested in playing BitD. Soon, we’re going to have our “Session Zero”, in which we will:

1) read through the v7.1 rules

2) create a crew

Any pointers? pitfalls? suggestions? advice?

Thanks!

10 thoughts on “I’ve finally put together a group interested in playing BitD.”

  1. Don’t be afraid to jump between creating character and creating crew steps back and forth. A lot of times parts of one informs parts of the other. I like to figure out the Crew type first, then jump over to characters then back around to crew for a while. Things like figuring out which Faction ticks your crew has +/-‘s with can help you imagine your backstory heritage and why those factions hate or love these characters more. Then seeing the types of characters you have after a few steps can help you figure out what crew special ability you want more than if you pick it right off the top.

  2. Character gen takes care of basic familiarity pretty well. Don’t be afraid to be upfront about the setting inspirations – give them as much evocative duskwall as they want and you need to set the right mood.

    PC and crew creation will shape the premise of your game, but type of crew does NOT restrict what scores you can do. Depending on your players’ experience they may need guiding through the more player empowered narrative style that say, John Harper​​​ uses in the playtest – that said, there’s plenty of room for a more D&D GM style if you want. Some players may need to get used to flashbacks and not filling in every aspect of their background. Just keep positively reinforcing it in the first sessions.

    Also: You can have two people with the same playbook, but keeping PCs unique is better. Large groups are going to need big, complex challenges to soak up all that combined stress.

  4. For players that are unfamiliar with the Duskvol setting, the two things that take the most time are choosing a heritage and picking the faction ticks. Saying “you are local, just pick Akoros” can get round the first and is a reasonable compromise for a starting game. The faction ticks can also be left blank and filled in over the first few sessions. In fact it’s quite possible to not decide on a crew type immediately and run a few sessions with the crew getting to know each other and doing scores that interest them. 3 of the 4 ways of earning crew xp are common across all crew sheets and so the group can still gain xp, heat and rep without having a specific crew type.

  5. I guess if people make a character without knowing the system, our group normally has a session or two to let people try things out and change their character to better fit what they wanted, then it’s locked in. On the plus side, if they really hate playing their character, the can make a new one and their old one can drop in to an NPC role in the gang.

    I’d be careful with getting them all to read all the rules upfront too. I think John suggested starting with roles being risky standard, adding in complexity from there. I think it also says you can leave crew creation until after the first session so people can feel out what they want.

  6. Definitely you don’t want to try to explain all the rules at the start. No one will remember them. At character creation all I say is “It’s a d6 dice pool game where the highest die counts. The more dice you have to roll, the more chance you have of rolling a 6. Each dot you put on an Action is a die in the pool – the number of dice you get to roll. You can see that the first column is separated by a line. The dots in that column is the number of dice you get to roll when you Resist. That’s rather like a saving throw. So at the start you can either be specialised in one or two particular areas, or be more of a generalist and be able to Resist consequences better.”

    That maybe more than many people need but for those that like to get a handle on a system it’s enough for them to make a judgement call on how they want to play the game. Placing action dots is the main mechanical part of character creation and it’s useful for new players to see how they are used.

  7. I allowed “refactoring” the crew and PCs after the first 4-5 sessions. ‘Til then they knew the background/rules better and the educated guess was a bit more educated.

    Stating that they could do that upfront during the first session was helpful to avoid those stuck moments. As long as they knew that they can change it everthing’s worked out fine.

  8. It seems like there are going to be some changes to some of the core systems of BitD, so I’d suggest waiting for v8.0. That’s what I’m doing, anyways.

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